Pandemic, digital society, ethics and humanity

(by Davide D'Amico, public executive and AIDR councilor) We constantly talk about the importance of digital, and how necessary it is to transform our country, and in particular businesses and public administrations, towards new models based on modern technologies.

In reality, in this last period a real digital transformation of our society has taken place, and for better or for worse we are all involved. You can see this shift as analog freedoms have essentially become digital experiences during the state of emergency and lockdown from COVID-19. Beyond that, even a substantial part of our identity is now digital.

Work, entertainment, communication and social relations are activities that have undergone a substantial change being mainly transferred online. Our fingerprints have spread and continue to spread on the internet exponentially and with only an apparent disorder, which makes it easy to understand, with expert hands in technology, who we are, our character, our tastes, our habits, etc. ...

The flow of data spread online by each of us during the pandemic has promptly mobilized the interest of many businesses and governments, considering that our digital interactions and related data are of incalculable value, and not only for the enormous quantity referred to, but also for the correlated and previously unthinkable quality of the information collected. In practice, spending hours online, for work and for fun as well as to eliminate physical distances with our loved ones, is building an important aggregate of data and nuances on human behaviors and thoughts, which are accelerating the processes of "machine learning. ”Exponentially.

This now "infinite database of personal, character and behavioral information" unconsciously touches even deep psychological aspects of our daily life, and lays the foundations so that artificial intelligence can actually develop, through training based on millions of billions of ours " actions and thoughts "in the network. Never before would we have thought of helping technology to know so much about us and above all to learn from us and from our ways of doing and being.

This is taking place, in a context of necessity due to the pandemic emergency still in progress, often without an effective awareness due to the lack of knowledge and also to the lack of transparency of information, which has also made it possible to overcome, in many circumstances and even in an almost obvious way , one of the most important rights that man can have today: privacy.

Furthermore, something that must make us reflect more and more is that, in this moment of pandemic emergency, while on the one hand the State demonstrates its analogical power by stopping (in a certain sense) reality and confining citizenship to their homes for a long time, paralyzing inevitably the economy too, on the other hand the on-line world seems to have freed itself from the control and sovereignty of the state.

So a new parallel reality emerged that replaced the physical one and took hold more and more as each of us spends more and more time online.

Large technology companies increasingly dominate this virtual reality, which continues to expand thanks to the constant growth of online data traffic and it is increasingly difficult for governments to follow, anticipate and regulate the social changes that follow the innovations introduced by digital. in human behavior.

In this context, one of the fundamental factors to pay attention to is that, without democratic control over this process of technological emancipation, high risks can be taken for democracy. It is also necessary to carry out an in-depth analysis of what is happening at the society level: imagining a set of new rights, rules and guarantees that give shape to an effective and concrete digital citizenship, which is able to reconcile, in an effective way, technology with freedom. But this is not enough. It is also necessary to work to spread the related culture in all countries, in order to reduce the inequalities which, in many cases and especially in the poorest countries, digital technology contributes to increase.

In this sense, it is essential to think of a society in which digital consumption is in any case centered on an ethics for humanity.

Moving towards the future there is therefore an increasing need to establish the foundations for a renewed humanism. And in this sense it is important to give regulatory guarantees for what is and will increasingly be a digital society, in order to protect each individual from what may be the negative effects of an ever greater exposure of man to technologies and, at the same time, , of an almost certain and unstoppable search for a "humanization" of machines.

Pandemic, digital society, ethics and humanity